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The future? Photo: Plant & Food Research.
Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor wants the horticulture sector to look at developing the feijoa into a “fruit of the future”.
He says they are an amazing fruit Kiwis take for granted.
“Once a year, everyone picks them up off the ground, puts them in a plastic bag and shares them with friends and family,” O’Connor told the Horticulture Conference 2019 at Mystery Creek..
“Feijoas have huge potential. People say ‘they don’t last long so we can’t do anything with them’, but if we [started] varietal development and selection as they did with kiwifruit we could have another amazing export fruit.”
He suggests renaming feijoa as was done with Chinese gooseberries which became kiwifruit.
O’Connor says NZ has shown it can produce quality products in which people see health value and good eating.
“Among the many varieties must be some we can develop. I like them but I am not obsessed with them and just see this as a lost opportunity.”
O’Connor met a group of enthusiastic growers trying to form a cooperative but it didn’t go far enough.
Disease challenges exist but science could address those as for other fruits.
“We... need a development programme and hopefully would get a positive outcome,” he said.
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NZPork has appointed Auckland-based Paul Bucknell as its new chair.
The Government claims to have delivered on its election promise to protect productive farmland from emissions trading scheme (ETS) but red meat farmers aren’t happy.
Foot and Mouth Disease outbreaks could have a detrimental impact on any country's rural sector, as seen in the United Kingdom's 2000 outbreak that saw the compulsory slaughter of over six million animals.
The Ministry for the Environment is joining as a national award sponsor in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards (BFEA from next year).
Kiwis are wasting less of their food than they were two years ago, and this has been enough to push New Zealand’s total household food waste bill lower, the 2025 Rabobank KiwiHarvest Food Waste survey has found.
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